Ok, I admit that I have heard the argument that connectivity
alone can combat social, political and economic ills many times. It’s something
that Evgeny Morozov has called technological humanitarianism. Got a problem
with poverty, education or dictators? Throw some technology at it. Don’t try and
understand the problem or worry about the circumstances in which the technology
is deployed.

In discussing connectivity’s contribution to solving poverty
(ultimately in an effort to justify Twitter’s share price), the journalist
makes the general point that it changes behaviour radically and positively. He rehashes
some tired anecdotes, for example the one about the African farmer using his
mobile to find higher prices at market (no, I’m not sure about where Twitter
fits into this picture either).

The anthropological evidence, unsurprisingly, paints a more
nuanced picture. Namely in general terms digital technology
often facilitates social reproduction rather then change. Specifically,
anthropology has convincingly refuted the 'farmer uses phone' anecdote as myth.
In other words, the journalist is wildly optimistic about technology’s
potential to heal the world autonomously. Silicon Valley would welcome him as one of their
own.

But Silicon Valley might want to reconsider the welcome
after reading a few lines on. He maintains connectivity would do more for
Africa than immunity to malaria in financial terms (and that the investment of well-meaning
tech philanthropists such as Bill Gates into the latter is misdirected). That is
far from convincing in itself given what I say above (and think about
productivity gains from a healthy malaria-free population). Worse, he thinks a malaria cure
would actually cause more poverty because malaria acts as a great population control
mechanism in overpopulated countries, making it doubly stupid to invest in it
from a financial point of view.

Even if all his previous arguments stacked up we need to ask
him: Is money the only thing people care about? Even FT readers?

Anyway, I was moved to write a response that the FT published and an elaboration of it for the Popanth website.Postscript:
A timely intervention from Melinda Gates about the myth, propagated by the FT journalist, that saving lives leads to overpopulation (see myth three).

She notes that anxiety about the size of the world population has a dangerous tendency to override concern for the human beings who make up that population.

Friday, 27 September 2013

High profile entrepreneur Luke Johnson prefers them hard, at the expense of the soft.

I criticised him for his view that research and education funding should be concentrated even more on science, technology, engineering and maths subjects in my post on the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference blog, which can be accessed here.

In my capacity as one of the organisers I also invited Luke to attend EPIC. I wanted him to hear at first hand why "in order to be an engineer it is not enough to be an engineer," from some representatives of the technology companies he lauds.

Luke declined the offer and I responded: The exchange can be found below.

//////////////

Nik

Thanks for the invitation.

I’m afraid I have too much to do to
attend your conference.

I understand why you hold the views
you do, but I stand by my opinion on the importance of STEM education if the UK
is to retain its relative economic strength in the 21st century.
Social scientists didn’t found Google, Intel, IBM, Facebook, Microsoft etc.

Best

Luke

////////////////

Thanks for your response Luke,

Sorry to hear you can’t make the conference. Two points I’d
like to make before signing off:

a) Microsoft et al.’s global dominance might be better (or
at least co-) explained by a domestic US culture of risk taking or the
availability of VC money for example

b) China and India churn out hundreds of thousands of
engineers, yet lag in terms of innovation related to most STEM fields (measured by e.g. patents)

c) A number of US tech company founders dropped out of
their STEM courses and are proud of it

2

As a senior person developing products at a well-known Internet
company confided in me recently “purely engineering-driven companies do not
succeed for long.” Most large players are investing heavily in understanding what people want so that
their original inspirational ideas live on in relevant ways, or so that they
can take bold new directions. In the UK, Amstrad might have been a different
proposition with social scientists or humanities trained researchers on board

Friday, 16 August 2013

...argues a certain digital anthropology pundit, published in the FT today. Text follows...

Peter Cochrane, former head of technology for BT, maintains that our digital data will be collected whether we like it or not (“Spy bin ban highlights lure of big data”, FT August 14).He is wrong to suggest that we can simply extrapolate into the future what we experience now. It is also profoundly depressing to think that technology has an autonomous logic whose implications we should resign ourselves to. Technology, including big data, is what we make of it.

We have the power to create behavioural and legal frameworks to decide that features are harmful and constrain their impacts. In any event, these features are developed and exploited by people, companies and, in the case of the Prism spy programme, governments. These features are not inevitable or necessarily a sign of progress.

Let me illustrate with a historical example, for which I am indebted to internet theorist Evgeny Morozov, of where inevitablists who excused negative externalities in the name of technological progress were confronted.

In the early 20th century, champions of industrialisation maintained that a noisy living environment, where the din of machinery and motorised transport intrudes, was a necessary penalty of enjoying the benefits of progress. We should simply adapt to the new normal. However, noise abatement movements arose in opposition and inspired the noise pollution regulations that balance our interests today.

I notice that Peter's current title is futurologist but I hope that his version of the future, where noisy robots rule the earth unchecked, does not prevail. In my version we continue to have agency vis a vis our tools and some peace and quiet.

Gartner spokesperson John Mahoney says an anthropologist understands how groups of people work together
to get things done... “One of the
skills that effective digital organisations increasingly need is the skill to
design a digital environment
in ways people can use.” Therefore, he argues, CIOs should employ a digital
anthropologist post haste (although given his description he probably means ‘digital ethnographer’, as noted
by HP in the article*. The issue of whether the prefix digital means anything is something for another post).

Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to see that Gartner, an
important source of information for the technology functions at many large organisations,
is spreading the word that ‘it is not enough to be an engineer to be an
engineer’ (one of my favourite quotations, hence its pride of place next to
this blog’s headline). However, coming from an organisation that trumpets how it identifies trends in technology (exemplified by its hype
cycle), Gartner is definitely behind the curve on this one because
anthropologists have been profitably deployed at places such as Xerox PARC since the 80’s.

Gartner should also have recommended that CIOs have a
designer on the team too: Anthropologists (or in fact ethnographic researchers from several social scientific disciplines) can help organisations
better understand the people and culture-related issues that they face, but it usually
takes the skills of a designer to help realise solutions.

* To get fundamentalist about it, as digital anthropologist Tom Boellstorff notes (p.53): "ethnography is not a method; it is the written product of a set of methods, as the suffix -graphy (to write) indicates". However, the method of participant observation which is commonly, if inaccurately, used interchangeably with ethnography (i.e. "becom[ing] known to a community and participat[ing] in its everyday practices" (p.55)) is essential to anthropological ethnography because it allows us to appreciate the differences between what people say (which we gain from elicitation-type research such as interviews) and what they do. As he remarks: "culture [isn't] something in people's heads: a set of viewpoints that an interviewee can tell the researcher...[some]...things we cannot articulate, even to ourselves. Obvious cases of this include things that are repressed or unconscious, an insight dating back to Freud." (p.54)However, remember two points, expressed in this piece. Firstly ethnography isn’t about building an holistic picture of a culture (which is unachievable, even if we could agree what culture means):"Ethnography is always a matter of partial connections and patterns, as anthropologist Marilyn Strathern has argued. Ethnographic accounts are always parts that are never just parts of some pre-existing whole (Strathern 1991). One cannot reconstruct a whole culture from ethnographic pieces."Secondly there is nothing straightforwardly out there for the researcher to find and report back on: The researcher and her interpretation become part of the account:"Fieldsites are not ‘out there’ ready for representation, rather data is created and curated during fieldwork...ethnographic accounts are generative rather than descriptive…Ethnographic fieldsites have long been argued as not found but located and made (Gupta and Ferguson 1997); as a poetic juxtaposition of collected evidence and writing (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Clifford 1988); or, as an effect of the translation back and forth between fieldwork and deskwork locations (Strathern 1999)."

Sunday, 7 April 2013

The Observer has just carried a long piece about young Youtubers threatening the traditional TV model. Good on them: traditional TV is a bit of a dinosaur.

On a critical note, the piece makes the attention the Youtubers garner seem fairly effortless, exaggerates the likelihood of ‘normal people’ making a living in this way, doesn’t fully acknowledge the dark side of internet celebrity and makes an uncomplicated link between authenticity and social media content.

Here are some further readings if you like a side order of analysis with your light reading on a Sunday:

Spyer's anthropological take on the dynamics of social organisation of groups of YouTube beauty gurus shows in reality how much effort goes into video production and publicity.

Whilst this Atlantic article demonstrates how the attention only rarely turns into financial success (a fact glossed by the Observer).

Tuesday, 14 August 2012

Ajaz Ahmed’s premise is overly simple in his Guardian
piece, where he argues that radically simple design always wins. Here are
five simple reasons why his argument is suspect:

1. Counter examples show a cluttered
aesthetic can prove popular when you make the lens ‘local’ enough (see
anthropologist Daniel Miller’s meditations on Trinidadian preferences in ‘The
Internet: An Ethnographic Approach’)

2. Other factors contribute to market-leading
uptake, perhaps decisively so. Take Google, one of Ajaz’s own examples. To
suggest that its uncluttered visual design was the main factor downplays its
investment in technology and engineering talent to generate the most relevant
search results, along with a few early deals that increased traffic massively
e.g. with AOL. Further, was Myspace really decisively undone by Facebook's simpler design as he argues? Or was it a heap of contingencies
including network effects?

3. Are some of his paragons of simple
design that really simple? Facebook for example has inflicted poorly
thought-through privacy-impinging design decisions on its user (see
anthropologist danah boyd’s piece ‘Facebook’s
Privacy Trainwreck’).

4. Simplicity isn’t always a virtue. Many
people believe that TED’s simplicity/accessibility is actually problematic,
from its soundbite format which doesn't really enlighten to its guiding belief
that technology is an uncomplicated magic wand that will solve humanity's
problems (i.e. let's forget the messy business of really understanding a
problem and just parachute in more laptops per child). For more on such issues
check out this brutal TED takedown
from a former speaker.

5. Some of his paragons of simple design
might create losers of users. As an open project Wikipedia might be accessible
to many people (with an internet connection) and in theory any of these people
can get involved as an editor but it presents a skewed view of the world,
meaning there is room for improvement. Some facts: 1% of its editors contribute
half of all Wikipedia edits. Only 13% of editors are women. Most editors are
from the developed world. PR agency Bell Pottinger policed and amend entries on
behalf of rich and powerful clients (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16084861).
Here are more reasons why
the reflection of traditional structures in open projects might cause issues -
see the first video.

Arguably, Ajaz is absolved from the responsibility
of making society a better place because his goal is to foster the effective
design and navigation of commercially winning websites. But attending to the
broader societal context and what 'winning' might also entail, we see that
there is more to design than appealing visuals and functionality and that the
issue of simplicity becomes, well, complex.